OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Assessing the Impact of Blood Pressure on Cardiac Function Using Interpretable Biomarkers and Variational Autoencoders
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Maintaining good cardiac function for as long as possible is a major concern for healthcare systems worldwide and there is much interest in learning more about the impact of different risk factors on cardiac health. The aim of this study is to analyze the impact of systolic blood pressure (SBP) on cardiac function while preserving the interpretability of the model using known clinical biomarkers in a large cohort of the UK Biobank population. We propose a novel framework that combines deep learning based estimation of interpretable clinical biomarkers from cardiac cine MR data with a variational autoencoder (VAE). The VAE architecture integrates a regression loss in the latent space, which enables the progression of cardiac health with SBP to be learnt. Results on 3,600 subjects from the UK Biobank show that the proposed model allows us to gain important insight into the deterioration of cardiac function with increasing SBP, identify key interpretable factors involved in this process, and lastly exploit the model to understand patterns of positive and adverse adaptation of cardiac function.
Construction of efficient detectors for character information recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

We have developed and tested in numerical experiments a universal approach to searching objects of a given type in captured video images (for example, people's faces, vehicles, special characters, numbers and letters, etc.). The novelty and versatility of this approach consists in a unique combination of the well-known methods ranging from creating detectors to making decisions independent of the type of recognition objects. The efficiencies of various types of basic features used for image coding, including the Haar features, the LBP features, and the modified Census transformation are compared. A combination of the modified methods is used for constructing 11 types of detectors of the number of railway carriages and for recognizing digits from zero to nine. The efficiency of the constructed detectors is studied.
Extract Method Refactoring by Successive Edge Contraction
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2019
Year: 2019

Segmentation, a new approach based on successive edge contraction is introduced for extract method refactoring. It targets identification of distinct functionalities implemented within a method. Segmentation builds upon data and control dependencies among statements to extract functionalities from code by successive contraction of edges in the Structure Dependence Graph (SDG). Three edge contractions are explored, namely structural control edge contraction, exclusive data dependence edge contraction, and sequential data dependence edge contraction. The SDG is first constructed from the program, which is then collapsed into a segment graph that captures dependence between subtasks. An intermediate representation for data and control dependencies among statements keeps the technique language independent. The approach is evaluated on four case studies, including three from the open source domain, and the findings are reported.
Efficient Resource Allocation for Mobile-Edge Computing Networks with NOMA: Completion Time and Energy Minimization
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

This paper investigates an uplink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-based mobile-edge computing (MEC) network. Our objective is to minimize a linear combination of the completion time of all users' tasks and the total energy consumption of all users including transmission energy and local computation energy subject to computation latency, uploading data rate, time sharing and edge cloud capacity constraints. This work can significantly improve the energy efficiency and end-to-end delay of the applications in future wireless networks. For the general minimization problem, it is first transformed into an equivalent form. Then, an iterative algorithm is accordingly proposed, where closed-form solution is obtained in each step. For the special case with only minimizing the completion time, we propose a bisection-based algorithm to obtain the optimal solution. Also for the special case with infinite cloud capacity, we show that the original minimization problem can be transformed into an equivalent convex one. Numerical results show the superiority of the proposed algorithms compared with conventional algorithms in terms of completion time and energy consumption.
Channel Decomposition into Painting Actions
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2019
Year: 2019

This work presents a method to decompose a convolutional layer of the deep neural network into painting actions. To behave like the human painter, these actions are driven by the cost simulating the hand movement, the paint color change, the stroke shape and the stroking style. To help planning, the Mask R-CNN is applied to detect the object areas and decide the painting order. The proposed painting system introduces a variety of extensions in artistic styles, based on the chosen parameters. Further experiments are performed to evaluate the channel penetration and the channel sensitivity on the strokes.
Complicated Table Structure Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2019
Year: 2019

The task of table structure recognition aims to recognize the internal structure of a table, which is a key step to make machines understand tables. Currently, there are lots of studies on this task for different file formats such as ASCII text and HTML. It also attracts lots of attention to recognize the table structures in PDF files. However, it is hard for the existing methods to accurately recognize the structure of complicated tables in PDF files. The complicated tables contain spanning cells which occupy at least two columns or rows. To address the issue, we propose a novel graph neural network for recognizing the table structure in PDF files, named GraphTSR. Specifically, it takes table cells as input, and then recognizes the table structures by predicting relations among cells. Moreover, to evaluate the task better, we construct a large-scale table structure recognition dataset from scientific papers, named SciTSR, which contains 15,000 tables from PDF files and their corresponding structure labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed model is highly effective for complicated tables and outperforms state-of-the-art baselines over a benchmark dataset and our new constructed dataset.
DeepAISE -- An End-to-End Development and Deployment of a Recurrent Neural Survival Model for Early Prediction of Sepsis
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Sepsis, a dysregulated immune system response to infection, is among the leading causes of morbidity, mortality, and cost overruns in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). Early prediction of sepsis can improve situational awareness amongst clinicians and facilitate timely, protective interventions. While the application of predictive analytics in ICU patients has shown early promising results, much of the work has been encumbered by high false-alarm rates. Efforts to improve specificity have been limited by several factors, most notably the difficulty of labeling sepsis onset time and the low prevalence of septic-events in the ICU. Here, we present DeepAISE (Deep Artificial Intelligence Sepsis Expert), a recurrent neural survival model for the early prediction of sepsis. We show that by coupling a clinical criterion for defining sepsis onset time with a treatment policy (e.g., initiation of antibiotics within one hour of meeting the criterion), one may rank the relative utility of various criteria through offline policy evaluation. Given the optimal criterion, DeepAISE automatically learns predictive features related to higher-order interactions and temporal patterns among clinical risk factors that maximize the data likelihood of observed time to septic events. DeepAISE has been incorporated into a clinical workflow, which provides real-time hourly sepsis risk scores. A comparative study of four baseline models indicates that DeepAISE produces the most accurate predictions (AUC=0.90 and 0.87) and the lowest false alarm rates (FAR=0.20 and 0.26) in two separate cohorts (internal and external, respectively), while simultaneously producing interpretable representations of the clinical time series and risk factors.
A Deep Evolutionary Approach to Bioinspired Classifier Optimisation for Brain-Machine Interaction
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2019
Year: 2019

This study suggests a new approach to EEG data classification by exploring the idea of using evolutionary computation to both select useful discriminative EEG features and optimise the topology of Artificial Neural Networks. An evolutionary algorithm is applied to select the most informative features from an initial set of 2550 EEG statistical features. Optimisation of a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) is performed with an evolutionary approach before classification to estimate the best hyperparameters of the network. Deep learning and tuning with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) are also explored, and Adaptive Boosting of the two types of models is tested for each problem. Three experiments are provided for comparison using different classifiers: one for attention state classification, one for emotional sentiment classification, and a third experiment in which the goal is to guess the number a subject is thinking of. The obtained results show that an Adaptive Boosted LSTM can achieve an accuracy of 84.44%, 97.06%, and 9.94% on the attentional, emotional, and number datasets, respectively. An evolutionary-optimised MLP achieves results close to the Adaptive Boosted LSTM for the two first experiments and significantly higher for the number-guessing experiment with an Adaptive Boosted DEvo MLP reaching 31.35%, while being significantly quicker to train and classify. In particular, the accuracy of the nonboosted DEvo MLP was of 79.81%, 96.11%, and 27.07% in the same benchmarks. Two datasets for the experiments were gathered using a Muse EEG headband with four electrodes corresponding to TP9, AF7, AF8, and TP10 locations of the international EEG placement standard. The EEG MindBigData digits dataset was gathered from the TP9, FP1, FP2, and TP10 locations.
Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS)
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

Despite the massive investments in information security technologies and research over the past decades, the information security industry is still immature. In particular, the prioritization of remediation efforts within vulnerability management programs predominantly relies on a mixture of subjective expert opinion, severity scores, and incomplete data. Compounding the need for prioritization is the increase in the number of vulnerabilities the average enterprise has to remediate. This paper produces the first open, data-driven framework for assessing vulnerability threat, that is, the probability that a vulnerability will be exploited in the wild within the first twelve months after public disclosure. This scoring system has been designed to be simple enough to be implemented by practitioners without specialized tools or software, yet provides accurate estimates of exploitation. Moreover, the implementation is flexible enough that it can be updated as more, and better, data becomes available. We call this system the Exploit Prediction Scoring System, EPSS.
FairFace: Face Attribute Dataset for Balanced Race, Gender, and Age
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Existing public face datasets are strongly biased toward Caucasian faces, and other races (e.g., Latino) are significantly underrepresented. This can lead to inconsistent model accuracy, limit the applicability of face analytic systems to non-White race groups, and adversely affect research findings based on such skewed data. To mitigate the race bias in these datasets, we construct a novel face image dataset, containing 108,501 images, with an emphasis of balanced race composition in the dataset. We define 7 race groups: White, Black, Indian, East Asian, Southeast Asian, Middle East, and Latino. Images were collected from the YFCC-100M Flickr dataset and labeled with race, gender, and age groups. Evaluations were performed on existing face attribute datasets as well as novel image datasets to measure generalization performance. We find that the model trained from our dataset is substantially more accurate on novel datasets and the accuracy is consistent between race and gender groups.
A Cascade Sequence-to-Sequence Model for Chinese Mandarin Lip Reading
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Lip reading aims at decoding texts from the movement of a speaker's mouth. In recent years, lip reading methods have made great progress for English, at both word-level and sentence-level. Unlike English, however, Chinese Mandarin is a tone-based language and relies on pitches to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning, which significantly increases the ambiguity for the lip reading task. In this paper, we propose a Cascade Sequence-to-Sequence Model for Chinese Mandarin (CSSMCM) lip reading, which explicitly models tones when predicting sentence. Tones are modeled based on visual information and syntactic structure, and are used to predict sentence along with visual information and syntactic structure. In order to evaluate CSSMCM, a dataset called CMLR (Chinese Mandarin Lip Reading) is collected and released, consisting of over 100,000 natural sentences from China Network Television website. When trained on CMLR dataset, the proposed CSSMCM surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art lip reading frameworks, which confirms the effectiveness of explicit modeling of tones for Chinese Mandarin lip reading.
Tensor-Train Parameterization for Ultra Dimensionality Reduction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Locality preserving projections (LPP) are a classical dimensionality reduction method based on data graph information. However, LPP is still responsive to extreme outliers. LPP aiming for vectorial data may undermine data structural information when it is applied to multidimensional data. Besides, it assumes the dimension of data to be smaller than the number of instances, which is not suitable for high-dimensional data. For high-dimensional data analysis, the tensor-train decomposition is proved to be able to efficiently and effectively capture the spatial relations. Thus, we propose a tensor-train parameterization for ultra dimensionality reduction (TTPUDR) in which the traditional LPP mapping is tensorized in terms of tensor-trains and the LPP objective is replaced with the Frobenius norm to increase the robustness of the model. The manifold optimization technique is utilized to solve the new model. The performance of TTPUDR is assessed on classification problems and TTPUDR significantly outperforms the past methods and the several state-of-the-art methods.
Network Lifetime Maximization in Wireless Mesh Networks for Machine-to-Machine Communication
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper we present new optimization formulations for maximizing the network lifetime in wireless mesh networks performing data aggregation and dissemination for machine-to-machine communication in the Internet of Things. We focus on heterogeneous networks in which multiple applications co-exist and nodes may take on different roles for different applications. Moreover, we address network reconfiguration as a means to increase the network lifetime, in keeping with the current trend towards software defined networks and network function virtualization. To test our optimization formulations, we conducted a numerical study using randomly-generated mesh networks from 10 to 30 nodes, and showed that the network lifetime can be increased using network reconfiguration by up to 75% over a single, minimal-energy configuration. Further, our solutions are feasible to implement in practical scenarios: only few configurations are needed, thus requiring little storage for a standalone network, and the synchronization and signalling needed to switch configurations is low relative to each configuration's operating time.
Towards Explainable AI Planning as a Service
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2019
Year: 2019

Explainable AI is an important area of research within which Explainable Planning is an emerging topic. In this paper, we argue that Explainable Planning can be designed as a service -- that is, as a wrapper around an existing planning system that utilises the existing planner to assist in answering contrastive questions. We introduce a prototype framework to facilitate this, along with some examples of how a planner can be used to address certain types of contrastive questions. We discuss the main advantages and limitations of such an approach and we identify open questions for Explainable Planning as a service that identify several possible research directions.
Multi-Agent Manipulation via Locomotion using Hierarchical Sim2Real
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

Manipulation and locomotion are closely related problems that are often studied in isolation. In this work, we study the problem of coordinating multiple mobile agents to exhibit manipulation behaviors using a reinforcement learning (RL) approach. Our method hinges on the use of hierarchical sim2real -- a simulated environment is used to learn low-level goal-reaching skills, which are then used as the action space for a high-level RL controller, also trained in simulation. The full hierarchical policy is then transferred to the real world in a zero-shot fashion. The application of domain randomization during training enables the learned behaviors to generalize to real-world settings, while the use of hierarchy provides a modular paradigm for learning and transferring increasingly complex behaviors. We evaluate our method on a number of real-world tasks, including coordinated object manipulation in a multi-agent setting. See videos at https://sites.google.com/view/manipulation-via-locomotion
Swimming locomotion of Soft Robotic Snakes
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

Bioinspired snake robotics has been a highly active area of research over the years and resulted in many prototypes. Much of these prototypes takes the form of serially jointed-rigid bodies. The emergence of soft robotics contributed to a new type of snake robots made from compliant and structurally deformable modules. Leveraging the controllable large bending, these robots can naturally generate various snake locomotion gaits. Here, we investigate the swimming locomotion of soft robotic snakes. A numerically efficient dynamic model of the robot is first derived. Then, a distributed contact modal is augmented to incorporate hydrodynamic forces. The model is then numerically tested to identify the optimal bending propagation for efficient swimming. Results show that the soft robotic snakes have high potential to be used in marine applications.
Skill Transfer in Deep Reinforcement Learning under Morphological Heterogeneity
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Transfer learning methods for reinforcement learning (RL) domains facilitate the acquisition of new skills using previously acquired knowledge. The vast majority of existing approaches assume that the agents have the same design, e.g. same shape and action spaces. In this paper we address the problem of transferring previously acquired skills amongst morphologically different agents (MDAs). For instance, assuming that a bipedal agent has been trained to move forward, could this skill be transferred on to a one-leg hopper so as to make its training process for the same task more sample efficient? We frame this problem as one of subspace learning whereby we aim to infer latent factors representing the control mechanism that is common between MDAs. We propose a novel paired variational encoder-decoder model, PVED, that disentangles the control of MDAs into shared and agent-specific factors. The shared factors are then leveraged for skill transfer using RL. Theoretically, we derive a theorem indicating how the performance of PVED depends on the shared factors and agent morphologies. Experimentally, PVED has been extensively validated on four MuJoCo environments. We demonstrate its performance compared to a state-of-the-art approach and several ablation cases, visualize and interpret the hidden factors, and identify avenues for future improvements.
Predicting Eating Events in Free Living Individuals -- A Technical Report
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

This technical report records the experiments of applying multiple machine learning algorithms for predicting eating and food purchasing behaviors of free-living individuals. Data was collected with accelerometer, global positioning system (GPS), and body-worn cameras called SenseCam over a one week period in 81 individuals from a variety of ages and demographic backgrounds. These data were turned into minute-level features from sensors as well as engineered features that included time (e.g., time since last eating) and environmental context (e.g., distance to nearest grocery store). Algorithms include Logistic Regression, RBF-SVM, Random Forest, and Gradient Boosting. Our results show that the Gradient Boosting model has the highest mean accuracy score (0.7289) for predicting eating events before 0 to 4 minutes. For predicting food purchasing events, the RBF-SVM model (0.7395) outperforms others. For both prediction models, temporal and spatial features were important contributors to predicting eating and food purchasing events.
Multimodal Emotion Recognition Using Deep Canonical Correlation Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Multimodal signals are more powerful than unimodal data for emotion recognition since they can represent emotions more comprehensively. In this paper, we introduce deep canonical correlation analysis (DCCA) to multimodal emotion recognition. The basic idea behind DCCA is to transform each modality separately and coordinate different modalities into a hyperspace by using specified canonical correlation analysis constraints. We evaluate the performance of DCCA on five multimodal datasets: the SEED, SEED-IV, SEED-V, DEAP, and DREAMER datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate that DCCA achieves state-of-the-art recognition accuracy rates on all five datasets: 94.58% on the SEED dataset, 87.45% on the SEED-IV dataset, 84.33% and 85.62% for two binary classification tasks and 88.51% for a four-category classification task on the DEAP dataset, 83.08% on the SEED-V dataset, and 88.99%, 90.57%, and 90.67% for three binary classification tasks on the DREAMER dataset. We also compare the noise robustness of DCCA with that of existing methods when adding various amounts of noise to the SEED-V dataset. The experimental results indicate that DCCA has greater robustness. By visualizing feature distributions with t-SNE and calculating the mutual information between different modalities before and after using DCCA, we find that the features transformed by DCCA from different modalities are more homogeneous and discriminative across emotions.
Towards End-to-End Learning for Efficient Dialogue Agent by Modeling Looking-ahead Ability
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

Learning an efficient manager of dialogue agent from data with little manual intervention is important, especially for goal-oriented dialogues. However, existing methods either take too many manual efforts (e.g. reinforcement learning methods) or cannot guarantee the dialogue efficiency (e.g. sequence-to-sequence methods). In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a novel end-to-end learning model to train a dialogue agent that can look ahead for several future turns and generate an optimal response to make the dialogue efficient. Our method is data-driven and does not require too much manual work for intervention during system design. We evaluate our method on two datasets of different scenarios and the experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of our model.